The Form

Narrative poetry – all oral

¯ ¯

Popular Poetry Court Poetry

¯ ¯

Light Serious

¯ ____¯___________

Comic Tragic

Re: Gods Re: Men

Fiction Historically True

King initiates Muse initiates

Indecent Festal, ceremonial

_________________

¯ ¯

Primary Epic Secondary Epic

¯ _____¯_________

(Ex: Iliad, Beowulf) (Ex: Aenid)

Heroic Story - Supra-personal

personal greatness of

subject

Undercurrent of Sense of progress

despair, the and purpose,

meaninglessness development

of time, change over time

Enhanced by envi- Stylistic elevation

ronment of cere- must compensate

mony, solemnity for lack of public

solemn setting

_______________

The Matter

Subject:

The Fall of Man

Corresponds to the Greatness of Subject required of Secondary Epic

Presuppositions:

Christian Theology

Orthodox doctrines must be known if not believed, in order to rightly read the poem

Hierarchical Conception

Happiness consists in obedience to God, who is superior; True freedom is only possible for those who obey His rules

Platonic Angelogy

Angels have corporeal reality, aereal bodies, incredible swiftness, powers of transformation, contraction and dilation

Characters:

Satan – A liar and self-deceived

Satan’s Followers – Uncovering further recesses of evil

Angels – Joy in obedience to God; Triumphant

Adam and Eve – King and Queen; Innocent but not Savage

…every poem has two parents – its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form…The matter inside the poet wants the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of great work. The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him, and much of which he himself had no suspicion.

The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.

Epic diction, Christmas fare, and the liturgy, are all examples of ritual – that is, or something set deliberately apart from daily usage, but wholly familiar within its own sphere. [Ritual] is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feeling, by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.

By a Stock Response,[we] mean a deliberately organized attitude which is substituted for the ‘direct free play of experience’. In my opinion such deliberate organization is one of the first necessities of human life, and one of the main functions of art is to assist it. All that we describe as constancy in love or friendship, as loyalty in political life, or, in general, as perseverance – all solid virtue and stable pleasure – depends on organizing chosen attitudes and maintaining them against the eternal flux of mere immediate experience. …To me, it seems that most people’s responses are not ‘stock’ enough, and that the play of experience is too free and too direct in most of us for safety or happiness or human dignity…. That elementary rectitude of human response, ….so far from being ‘given’ is a delicate balance of trained habits, laboriously acquired and easily lost, on the maintenance of which depend both our virtues and our pleasures and even, perhaps, the survival of our species …poetry was formerly one of the chief means whereby each new generation learned, not to copy, but by copying to make, the good Stock responses.